Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

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were the economic circumstances and the sense of confidence in the art economy. In 1968, for
example, the U.S. was still riding a boom and the art world was experiencing an unprecedented
infusion of cash from a new wave of very ambitious collectors, the rise of corporate sponsorship
and from a renewed emphasis on government funding represented most notably by the NEA.
Could you comment on the different economic circumstances at work in the two contexts and
how they differently and similarly influenced (what we might agree, for the purposes of discussion,
to refer to as) “the dematerialization of art”?
L.C.: Well, that is precisely the point I tried to tell Alex Alberro when we had our conversation
a couple of years ago. It is the same point that made Jane Farver, Rachel Weiss and me
want to organize the Queens Museum exhibit and, earlier, what many years ago prompted me
to start writing about this. There are local clocks and many histories on this, not even just two.
China elaborated its own version in the 1980s, so did Korea, and Japan started somewhere in
the 1950s. And if you accept Lettrist and Situationist contributions as part of this history(ies),
the configuration becomes even richer within the mainstream itself. And in Latin America it
also becomes complicated to put everything into one mold: Brazil, benefiting from concrete
and neo-concrete poetry had approached this very early. So did Argentine artists, for somewhat
different reasons. Chile and Venezuela found their way a decade later. Colombia had one artist
in the late 1960s (Salcedo) and another one in the early and mid 1970s (Caro).
Some countries never felt the need to engage in conceptualist activities. But in each of
the cases what happened was not necessarily conditioned by what Artforum had to say, but
mostly by what questions were to be answered locally (I am talking here not about artists
following fads, but the culturally more important ones). Among those questions economy was
a crucial one. Economy, on one hand, was used as a determinant for politics and, on the other,
a determinant for production. Many artists did react to the affectation of reproducing an
“affluent finish” typical of the hegemonic mainstream. Somewhere I mentioned that “arte povera”
was more influential for some artists because of the evocations of the title than for the
actual work. But it was not just a “make do” approach based on modest available media. That
would have immediately led to the craftsy-identity stuff and the recycling approach in installations
(particularly Cuba, Chile and some in Mexico) that came about in the 1980s in Latin
America. It was more of a political assumption of a poverty coinciding with an absence of a
serious art market (serious in the sense of an ability to support artists). Good artists were educated
in their countries and then funded to travel to the cultural centers, rather than funded
to contribute locally. That was taken for granted and, for me at least, it took some political
enlightenment to discover that there was something wrong about this setup. But we shouldn’t